Link prediction for new users in Social Networks

Link prediction for new users who have not created any link is a fundamental problem in Online Social Networks (OSNs). It can be used to recommend friends for new users to start building their social networks. The existing studies use cross-platform approaches to predict a new user's links on a certain OSN by porting his existing links from other OSNs. However, it cannot work when OSNs are not willing to share their data or users do not want to connect different OSN accounts. In this paper, we use a single-platform approach to carry out the link prediction. We explore the users' profile attributes (e.g., workplace, high school and hometown) which can be easily obtained during the new users' sign up procedure. Based on the limited available information from the new user, along with the attributes and links from existing users, we extract three types of social features: basic feature, derived feature and latent relation feature. We propose a link prediction model using these social features based on Support Vector Machines. Eventually, we rely on a large Facebook data set consisting of 479,000 users to evaluate our proposed model. The result reveals that our model outperforms the baselines by achieving the AUC value of 0.83; it also demonstrates that each of the proposed social features contribute significantly to the prediction model.